The widespread use and rapid development of the computer technology has allowed software applications to be released to a global market. In order to prepare a software application for global release, a developer needs to configure localization information such as languages and/or dialects that the application will use. Each localization may take up more space as the number of characters and the type of characters changes from language to language.
Conventionally, designing the graphical user interface of an application to support different localizations requires a developer to design the user interface and then view the different localizations by viewing the user interface at run time. Unfortunately, this can quickly become time consuming as each localization needs to be viewed and checked for user interface conflicts such as overlaps. For example, two strings near each other may overlap when the strings are converted to Dutch as the corresponding strings in Dutch use more characters.
One conventional solution has been to take the English string length and multiple it by some factor, such as 2.5, to approximate the space taken by each localized string. This approach can assist in reducing user interface element conflicts but does not remove the need to check the graphical user interface during run time for localization conflicts.
Thus, what is needed is a way to indicate localization conflicts during design time.